


Stop Bath

by stoprobbers



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-14
Updated: 2014-06-14
Packaged: 2018-02-04 15:32:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1784173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stoprobbers/pseuds/stoprobbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Tumblr's TARDIS ficathon. Prompt: The Photo Room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stop Bath

In 1969 he buys her the camera in the shop window even though he's got half a dozen of them in the TARDIS already. Still, he can't resist the way her face lights up at the sight of the little Nikon and so in they go to charm the saleslady and get a few quid knocked off the price and a roll of film for free. She loads it carefully and proceeds to snap pictures of London past like a regular tourist — pigeons in Trafalgar square, the stoic guard in front of Buckingham palace, miniskirts and Nehru jackets on Carnaby Street, his lips crusted in salt and a sheen of vinegar when they stop for chips. They walk until their legs feel like they're about to fall off and then stop to watch the crowds of teenagers on their way out for the night in Soho, the camera cradled gently in her hands as he tucks her into the crook of his arm. Her eyes turn skyward and plaintive and with a smile he leads her back to the TARDIS.

He lands them quite a long walk from the moon landing site — a hop, skip, and a jump, he assures her and she practically falls over from how corny that is — so that there are no huge shifts in history thanks to a set of footprints already being there. She looks ridiculous (they both do) in her space suit; it's not as white and bulky as the ones they're about to see but it's still topped off with a reflective glass dome and comes with an oxygen tank and it's oddly wrinkly all over her, making her look kind of like a space monster made out of bin bags. He tells her so as he snatches the camera from the outer storage pouch of her suit and snaps a few pictures in rapid succession: an attempt at a cartwheel, the outraged realization he's snatched her toy, her silhouette against the backdrop of the Earth as she tries to tackle him and wrestle it away. It's tackling in slow motion, though, and it fails miserably as she ends up falling on her face and he ends up against a particularly large moon rock, clutching desperately at it in an attempt to stay upright as he laughs so hard his sides ache.

It's while he's incapacitated by this insurmountable fit of giggles that she manages to get the camera back. The way she huffs as she tucks it back in the pouch and then attempts to brush all the sparkly moondust off her suit just sends him back into another round of hysterics. The Lord of Time complete loses track of his kingdom as she shouts insults at him, muffled by her helmet and the thin atmosphere. It's only the vibrations of the ground as the Lunar Module touches down that snaps him out of it and sets them both into motion as they take off in the direction of living history.

When they get back to the TARDIS she's so tuckered out she collapses onto her bed still clothed and coiffed and he works her ponytail loose as she murmurs her teasing and the occasional soft yelp when he pulls out a few hairs here and there. He admonishes her, tells her she could make this easier on him and then she just makes it harder, kicking off her shoes and wiggling out of her skirt while he's still straddling her legs, and then pulling him down by his lapels. He allows it, just for a moment, lips against lips and the side of her nose against his. Then he pulls away, slides off the bed as she pouts.

He raises his eyebrow at that; he's building up a tolerance to those pouts.

She pulls her fuzzy sweater up and off in one smooth movement.

OK, not that much of a tolerance.

When they're done, spent and sweaty and even more tired than before, he reaches across her bare chest and plucks the camera from her nightstand and props himself up on an elbow, snapping a quick picture of her mussed hair and flushed face. She rolls her eyes, and snatches the camera away.

"Oi," she says, replacing it on the nightstand and then pulling him down on top of her again, "Don't waste the film."

He looks outrageously insulted she'd think a picture of her is a waste of film as she turns in his arms, pulling one hand against her stomach as she wiggles back into him. When this all started, when they crossed this line the first few times he thought that meant she wanted to go again — and sometimes she does, randy little human that she is — but that's not it at all; this is Rose, craving closeness and comfort. He happily snuggles against her back, his palm on her stomach and holding her close as her breath begins to even out.

***

He finds the little Nikon years later, when he's cleaning out her room. It's taken him a long time to get to this point, time that is far longer and so much shorter than he would have anticipated, and which is far longer than he thinks it ever has before, but he tries not to dwell on it. Instead he carefully and methodically sorts through things, grouping them together by theme and packing them neatly in boxes, then organizing the boxes against the emptiest stretch of wall. Everything he picks up triggers another memory, sends his mind flashing back in time as quickly as his TARDIS has ever been able to carry him, and he's turned fuzzily inward when he picks it up. The weight of the camera startles him out of this thoughts and he stares down at it in surprise before remembering what it is, when they got it. Her first trip to the moon and the night that followed.

He remembers, suddenly, snapping a picture of her sex-flushed cheeks and sets his most recent pile of bric-a-brac aside and strides off down the hallway with purpose.

He doesn’t go into this room that often, doesn't really need to with a brain as big and memory as good as his, but it's exactly where he left it, and unlocked. It sort of looks like the library but the books lining the seemingly endless shelves aren't filled with words, but with pictures. Photographs, to be specific, taken with every kind of film and printed on every kind of paper he's ever encountered. Some of them aren't even printed; there are small bottles with smoke that forms images based on memory and delicate glass boxes encasing three dimensional holograms he's carefully created in a time-consuming but really rather pleasant trancelike state. There are small disks that look like wafers that, when placed on the tongue, conjure images so vivid they come with scent and sound and sensation, allowing you to live the remembered moment over again. There are infinite variations of photography in the infinite universe, and he houses them here.

In the back of the room, beyond the shelves and the small groupings of sofas and chairs and tables for reminiscing, is another door and that is where he is going.

He pushes through the heavy wood and flips a switch to turn on the small red light on the wall outside, then steps into the little cylindrical room beyond. Inside that tiny room is a counter with the supplies he needs to begin developing film and he pushes on the wall, turning the little room slowly until the two doorways are blocked and there is no light. He sees better than a human but he is still mostly blind in this total darkness but that's all right; his hands move automatically, winding film and loading it onto the developing spool, then tucking all those parts and pieces into the rigid plastic container in which he'll pour the chemicals.

All around him voices from the past call out, even as his scientist's hands complete each step without a second thought. His granddaughter, waving a camera much like this one, as she skips out of a gift shop on her first visit to earth. Jamie and Zoe, taking photographs of each other in front of strange rock formations on alien worlds. Adric, completely confused and somehow still enchanted by the older, Earth-made cameras in his collection, nattering on about his own people's photographic devices and driving him spare. Romana, still and quiet on one of the sofas he's just passed, making her own Gallifreyan memory cubes. He loves and hates this room at the same time, filled with those he's loved so dearly and will never see again. It is kind and cruel, all at once.

A ding sounds from the machine he'd loaded the developed film into, letting him know it is now dry. He smiles, takes it, and pushes the wall again until the doors are realigned with their openings and he can step into his darkroom.

Unlike the photo room, it's neither grand, nor majestic, nor cluttered. There is a long table in the center with trays of chemicals and water, another long table against the wall with a couple enlargers and all their pieces. Carefully, he cuts the film into manageable strips and starts to look through his negatives. As he does, something warm bubbles up in him, unbidden. He doesn't visit his darkroom or his photo room often, the memories so often too much to bear, but he thinks perhaps he should. He thinks one of the things he learned from this pink and yellow human who is so dear to him is that for all the pain, the memories are worth it. Remembering is worth it. Remembering her hand, small and hot and human, in his as they took in Swinging London; remembering her lips, dry and hot in the day, wet and bruised in the night, salty and sweet and tasting of waxy lipstick and so much more. He has felt the fool for the innocence he let them have in those days, but maybe he shouldn't. Maybe, despite the fact that should have known better, that he knew better, there was nothing foolish at all about what they were doing.

His Time Lord brain, big and vast and oh so advanced, has calculated exposure times despite his reminiscence and when he snaps out of the past and back into the presence there are several sheets of exposed paper just waiting for science's magic touch. A soft smile on his face, he brings them over to the table and drops them in the first tray. Like magic the white surface, glowing bright red in the darkroom light, begins to shift and change. Shadows appear and deepen. Shapes take form, grow detail. Time pauses, shifts backwards, emerges in a stolen, frozen moment. How has he forgotten how much he likes photographs?

The first picture is him, gazing off with his face mostly turned away, maybe looking at some rather colorfully dressed blokes just barely visible down the street, he can't quite tell. He can't quite remember, either, not that little detail (other little details, like the scent of the perfume she tried on in Harrods that day, he remembers that so clearly). It's just the test print, really, confirmation that his mental calculations were correct and if the shadows and light happen to make his jaw look particularly angular, and his neck particularly long and graceful, and the slope of his shoulders particularly dignified, well, he's just a handsome bastard this time around and there's nothing to be done about it. He dunks it in water, then moves it along without much of a pause. Then Rose in her space suit, lumbering towards him, trying to snatch the camera away in slow motion. The grin widens to a full smile, which emits a soft chuckle, and he shifts that one over slower, more delicately, moving each piece of paper down the line in turn. And finally Rose's face, flushed and sated and a little sleepy, glowing with sex and a little embarrassment, relaxed and off-guard. He watches this one fill itself in, each detail coming into sharper and sharper clarity, until it is as perfect and alive as its subject before he moves it on. Developer, stop bath, fixer.

A photograph spends only thirty seconds or so in the stop bath, which is just enough time to halt the developer so the image doesn't get too dark. Overexposure, overdevelopment; just a second or two is enough for an image otherwise so perfectly full of life to become a muddled and muted mass of dull grays and blacks. He has wished many times in his long, long life that there was a stop bath for time, a way of freezing things when they are just right so they can stay that way forever. Just a handful of seconds to preserve perfection forever. And he thinks he would have done it, if he could have — just frozen them and the universe in that moment before everything went pear shaped, before she was gone and he was alone again, always alone in the end. He could have made time stop and had bliss.

Sarah Jane once told him that pain and loss define them as much as happiness and he knows she is right, but the space between his hearts aches no less all the same. He moves the image to water for another rinse and then drops it in the last tray to join its mates for a longer soak in fixer. The chemical that makes the image stay, which sets it forever. Another thing he wishes the universe has and knows it should not.

When he was young he did not understand the correlation between age and wisdom, and now that he's old he hates being wise.

Hands and arms wind their way around his waist and he jumps in complete surprise.

"You scared me," he says, covering them with his own before their owner can pull away. "Didn't hear you come in."

"I thought you had superior Time Lord hearing."

"I have superior Time Lord everything."

He loosens his grip and the hands' owner slides around to his front to gaze up at him with a soft smile. Her hair is mussed and there are still crinkles in her cheek from where the pillow creased against it.

"You were supposed to be sleeping."

"I was sleeping. I slept a lot. You were supposed to be getting my stuff so we could put it in your room, but you weren't in there when I went to find you. Moved the boxes, though, so that's that done."

"I got distracted."

"I figured," she grins at him, tongue caught between her teeth and he leans down to kiss that smile just because he can. Because she found her way back, because she forced him out of being frozen in the moment he lost her, because time doesn't stop and that means change doesn't stop and now they are something better, greater, than they were before.  _Everything has its time_ , Sarah Jane told him,  _and everything ends._ He adds, in his mind, that things begin anew, too.

"I didn't know the TARDIS had a darkroom," Rose murmurs when he pulls away, glancing past him at the photos still floating in the fixer. "Hold on, are those pictures I took?"

"Well,  _I_  took that one," he gestures at his post-coital portrait without properly letting her go, tugs her closer in fact, "but the rest, yes. From 1969, do you remember?"  
  
"Of course I remember! We saw the moon landing! I loved that trip, that's the first time you took me to the moon." 

"Because I am devastatingly romantic."

"Yes, because you are devastatingly romantic," she rolls her eyes and doesn't resist when he pulls her into a tight hug. "I'd forgotten all about these."

"Found the camera while I was packing up. Honestly, I'd forgotten too."

"You? Your gigantic Time Lord brain forgot something? Well, I'll be. No wonder you have so many pictures."

"I'll have you know I remember every single moment of my unimaginably long life, thank you very much. You see how quickly you can recall every last detail of yours! Mine is fifty times longer, you know."

"Can I see it?"

"See what?" he asks, momentarily confused. She lets him go, takes his hand and starts to lead him back out to the photo room proper and he catches her drift just before she start to speak.

"This unimaginably long life of yours," she answers, gesturing at the first shelf of photo albums she sees when she opens the door. He draws her in close to his side.

"Welllll, maybe not  _those_. Those are all landscapes, you know, collected from the great photographers from around the universe, and I really do mean around the universe. One time I was on Paroxis VII and–"

 "Ok, not  _those_ ," she cuts him off with a giggle and tugs him away from the doorway. "We can start wherever you like. But can I see them, your pictures?"

 He knows what she is really asking, has been asking and he's been answering; that's why he'd been in her room, sorting and organizing and readying all her little things, her personal explosion, to be set next to all his little things, his personal explosion, so that they can mingle into their personal explosion. He draws her close, kisses her soundly, and abruptly lets her go. She looks a little dazed.

 "Well, Rose Tyler," he gestures grandly to the shelves in front of them, "where do you want to start?"


End file.
